


Wide Her Parish

by speakmefair



Category: Richard II - Shakespeare
Genre: F/M, Implied Relationships, M/M, Marriage, Miscarriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 19:31:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/pseuds/speakmefair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anne of Bohemia is born to be a queen.  Being Richard's wife, on the other hand, is a little more complicated...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wide Her Parish

**Author's Note:**

  * For [angevin2](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angevin2/gifts).



**Winter, 1381 -1382**

 _'a tiny scrap of humanity'_

The first thing that Anne of Bohemia thinks, when she has stopped being so cold and wet and sea-sick that thinking is an impossibility, is that England imports its water directly from the unpleasant source she had just escaped.

There is no possible other explanation for why she is still in danger of getting re-soaked every time she dares to put her face outside her tent.

"Not much travelling now," she is reassured, and is grateful for the fact that at least with this much of the court, French is still the accepted language. She knows better than to listen to all the stories of what she will be expected to endure, in the coming days (she can think of days with composure, but the idea of the weeks and months and oh, Mary, Mother of God, years that stretch before her are not something she is yet capable of feigning equanimity about).

"And you will not have to do it in a ship!" the lord says, laughing. The lord whose name she cannot remember, can only frantically wonder if this is appropriate, if he should speak to her like this, if this is yet another sign that all will not be as well as her father promised.

But she follows the direction in which he is pointing, back to the terrible sea she never wants to travel upon again as long as she lives, and sees the wreckage left behind them.

The ships are gone, and Anne is safe.

She has no doubt that this will not be seen as a good exchange, but rather a bad omen, a sign that she is bringing bad luck in her wake, as the petrels bring storms.

**

 _'gentle in body'_

She has forgotten the bad omens by the January of her marriage, forgotten even what she had so quickly assessed, that she is watched with wariness, wondered about, discussed.

She is bought, contrary to all usual practises, not sold, after all, and why that should be such unwelcome news to England (when it brings her heart only a kind of singing pleasure to know) is an oddity she puts among all the new customs she will never fully comprehend.

Stranger still, she knows that if she must (as even royal brides must, are, always will) be discussed for her price, then surely it should heighten, not lessen, her value in their eyes, that their King desired her enough to meet her father's every term?

But her pride is augmented, since her cold arrival; augmented by the knowledge that it was not only her father's potential help that was paid for by King Richard's money (she still does not see what his advisors have to do with it) but her presence here, at his side, as his Queen.

And a little later (a very little later) as his wife in all ways, and so no longer an ill-omened girl with a heavy accent, but the wearer of his crown and his approval and his love in every public gesture he can think of to make her, she is prouder still, and happy too; a happy bride in all senses of the word.

They cry 'God Bless Queen Anne,' now, as she and King Richard travel the country.

"I wish I could give you more," he says one night.

"What more is there to give?"

"A world," Richard says, for he is Richard, too, just as she is Anne. They are Richard and Anne as well as King and Queen, they have their nights as well as their days.

"And what would I do with a world?"

"Wear it for a bauble," Richard suggests, and laughs at his own fantasy, less a boy in his enjoyment of the thought than he should have been at such silliness, until she smiles too, and kisses him.

They are falling in love. It feels easy, right, ordained.

He gives her a star-sapphire for a new and lighter crown, and tells her that each fleck within it is a world that will one day be theirs.

*

 **Spring, 1382**

 _'fair as is the rose in May'_

Richard is bad-tempered, though he hides it well when he must. The spring light is too sharp, too revealing, brings all his frustrations at his youth and his limits to the fore.

Anne shares none of them save for his sake. She fears he will lose patience with her, too, for her inability to feel that same anger, that same desire to be free.

But Anne is bought and paid for, and Anne is loyal to her brother, and Anne, more than any of these things, is in love, and it is spring, and the children bring her new-cut flowers.

She feels no resentment.

And she comes to learn that her lack of it lessens Richard's frustration, for he can tell her of his own feelings and know that it does not damage what is beginning to grow between them.

The jealousy, unexpected and surprising and so very evident, that some of Richard's court show without even an attempt at disguise, is another matter.

"They're used to my attention," Richard says one night.

He sounds guilty, which is not something Anne wishes to hear in their bed, not when they are still discovering each other's bodies, not when there is still so much pleasure stored, like grain in a storehouse of their hearts and limbs, waiting only for their touch to multiply once more.

"And they fail to realise you still show it." Anne can use honesty as a blade, when she must, and she knows when it _is_ 'must' and not merely pique. The other can be swallowed, refined, adjusted into something explicable. _Must_ , though, is an immediacy, it should never be used between them as a hidden blow.

They are learning, as this progress continues, but they are learning fast.

Love is a harder taskmaster even than Richard's kingship.

"Yes," Richard says, flushing slightly. "For in the ways I — the ways they are accustomed to — I do not, Anne. I do not wish to. I _should not_. They know my world has changed."

It is not _they_ , not really. It is Robert de Vere, and his jealousy springs from pain, and Anne might not quite understand why, but she does not want to be the cause of it, nor anyone to suffer from it.

Whatever Richard thinks, separation of such an absolute nature is not wise or fair or right.

"But that is unfair." She knows the word is wrong, might cause offence, but Richard, easily offended, is never so by her, nor is he now. "If it were me — if I felt this to have gone from me, I would sorrow."

Richard nods, his acquiescence a little too quick, too easy, but she does not enquire. "I will make it right," he says, and kisses her hands as though she has granted him a boon.

Anne asks for another jewel to replace the star-sapphire in her little light coronet, and wears it instead around her throat, dropping down to the place where her pulse beats, showing her heart, showing what force it is that powers the worlds Richard would give her.

Showing their love.

The jealousy diminishes. Richard spends more time with his companions — and with de Vere.

Anne asks no questions.

**

 **Summer, 1383**

 _'the happiness of love'_

There are eagles in black, on the ceiling of Norwich's Great Hospital, acknowledgement that she, too, has a hand in what should be done in this country, and an emerging place in her subject's hearts — and Anne's courses are late by three weeks.

She knows she should have waited, knows that telling Richard now is foolish, is inviting fate to take a hand and spin their wheel downwards, but — she knows.

She knows, and she cannot bear the thought of holding that knowledge within her as a kernelled secret, the seed of distrust sown between them rather than the seed of hoped-for joy.

They call her beautiful now, as well as good.

Richard calls her his joy and his love — and other things, too, not to even think upon in the bright light of day, for fear her face and the rising blood within it, the quickening movement of her pulse and the pendant that still rests upon it whenever she can find a reason for its wearing, will betray her.

Their love is not a secret. But the expression of it, she feels, should not be disclosed to any avid gaze.

She knows which of these things she treasures most, and finding that to be her own bedrock of truth, finds a new contentment.

Even when her kernel of expectation becomes the first in a series of wept-over, craved-for losses, she remembers Norwich, and the eagles, with pure joy.

**

 _'for three may keep a counsel'_

Robert de Vere is a good man, and a good friend, and he is other things that Anne must never acknowledge she knows.

But she would not deprive anyone of Richard's love, and she knows that his for her is no less because he also wears another in his heart.

And — when it is hard, when Richard is battling, day after day, for any kind of autonomy, and she is caught between her love and care for him, and grief for the life that will never come to be, she is glad, too, that there is another among them who would do anything for Richard's happiness.

It is a strange life, here at the summer's ending, and sometimes a sad life, and there are days when the flowers make her weep, as they come to the end of their allotted span, and the colours around her darken to rich green from the yellows and reds and whites of the gardens that she has come to expect and love — when there are no more daisies to be showered upon her by laughing children, and no more cornflowers to be gathered from the fields, because the harvest is approaching (her lost harvest, she sometimes thinks, and the tears spring anew)—then she is glad, she is glad that there is Robert, for there is one thing she is not yet strong enough to bear alone.

And that is Richard's grief for her.

**

 **Autumn, 1384**

 _'beauteous in body'_

Anne is loved, and she is Queen, and she has joy in her bed and in her days.

She can see no end to what might be possible.

And the harvest no longer causes her grief, for she can hope once more, and this time it is not her and Richard's secret alone, but Robert's too, because Richard was not made to bear fear alone (and he is afraid, Anne knows it and cannot help him, for beneath her assumed serenity, she is afraid too) and he guards them like some fierce dragon from prying eyes.

He guards them both, and that, too, is an unlooked for joy.

She reads the words of Julian of Norwich, Norwich that she thinks upon with such love, and holds them in her heart along with Richard's words of belonging, owning, loving. She adds them to her storehouse, her treasure-chest of learnt hope and known truth.

 _"And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus: 'It is all that is made.' I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.' In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it."_

"A world," Richard had said, in the days before they knew loss was possible. "Wear it for a bauble."

And Anne does.

**


End file.
